Median Time To Kill from Massive Breakdown Weapon Stats
Reading this sheet
Primary Weapons are organized from High Impact at the top of each class down to the lowest Impact at the bottom.
The columns are Weapon Archetypes, Minimum Crit shots needed for the Median TTK, Body Shots needed if the Crits are landed, and the Median Time To Kill in seconds.
The rows are defined by the name of a well known example or two followed by the Impact class.
Sidearm classes are defined with the Impact in parentheses followed by the Impact designation, except for Exotics, which are noted individually. Machine Guns are setup the same way. I didn't do any other Special or Heavy Weapons because they should all be one hit kills most of the time.
That said, I will look at adding Fusion Rifles 2HK's and/or Shotgun/Sniper 2HK's if people are interested. Rockets and Swords are right out though.
An Overly Long Explanation
So my curiosity was this: How do weapons stack up against each other when we assume sub-optimal shooting? In other words, for the majority of Guardians who, in the chaos of the Crucible, miss shots, land as many body hits as crits, and so forth, what is a realistic expectation for TTK?
Thanks to Mercules' well known Weapon Stats Spreadsheet, I had easy access to his crit and body TTK data, so I started working from there. The next step was to decide how to calculate a "realistic" Time To Kill.
Now sure, I could have spent thousands of hours pouring through YouTube and accumulating data to figure out the real TTK of the average Guardian for any given weapon. But first, I would have needed to quit my job, divorce my wife, and abandon my child.
That avenue quickly dismissed, I have instead settled on calculating Time To Kill based on a median number of crits landed. If you don't know what the term Median means, it's this:
denoting or relating to a value or quantity lying at the midpoint of a frequency distribution of observed values or quantities, such that there is an equal probability of falling above or below it.
Then again, it could be this:
the strip of land between the lanes of opposing traffic on a divided highway.
But that's neither here nor there. The simplest explanation is this:
the median value of a range of values.
That is, if it takes 10 crits to attain the optimal TTK (I'm looking at you, mid Impact Auto Rifles), I'll do the math for 5.
However, things didn't work out evenly in a number of cases and I had to bring a certain degree of reasonableness and personal experience in to make up the difference. Hand Cannons, as we all know, often kill in 3 shots, but because they can be very inaccurate at a lot of ranges, I rounded down to assume only 1 crit. I also calculated Median Time To Kill twice for some Auto Rifle and Pulse Rifle archetypes to account for more or less accurate shooting since they can vary a meaningful amount.
tl;dr: I made a spreadsheet showing more realistic Crucible Time To Kill calculations for the average player. Thanks to Mercules904 again for the data and the help with Pulse Rifle math (it's harder than you think).